Great review SKY. I'll admit this latest release is tempting me yet again. I do like what I'm seeing and it almost seems better to just buy a 6850 and OC it to death (lots of potential) rather then to splurge on a 6870. I just might have to wait for the nicer coolers to be released aka Vapor-X versions before I make another purchase. Should have held off buying my 460 1GB darn.

Great review SKY. I'll admit this latest release is tempting me yet again. I do like what I'm seeing and it almost seems better to just buy a 6850 and OC it to death (lots of potential) rather then to splurge on a 6870. I just might have to wait for the nicer coolers to be released aka Vapor-X versions before I make another purchase. Should have held off buying my 460 1GB darn.

Looks like XFX borrowed the Vapor X tech from Sapphire with their "VC" Edition of the card ie
Vapor Chamber.
Im still happy with my 5870 vapor X, I was hoping these new 6*** cards would have some impact on the 5800 card pricing... i guess I'll have to wait till December for the high end 6*** cards to be released.

Hey guys, before you purchase a 6870 or 6850 or anything in the next couple weeks, you might wanna wait for Black Friday. I forgot bout that till RFD said that Memory Express has the 6850 selling for $200.

To make things a little more clear for the end user, AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing, will and is used in software like Cyberlink MediaShow and power director, ArcSoft MediaConverter 4, SimHD (upscaling, H.264 encoding), Total media Theatre (HW accelerated MPEG4/MVC ), Roxio Creator 2010, Adobe Photoshop CS4 and so on ... where the GPU assists the software in certain functions, offloading the processor.
Of course among it also falls ... folding ...

from what wiz says they're locked at the factory, no bios unlocking can 'liberate' them if its done that way. so any chance on retail parts to be unlockable, slim to non existent.
unless we get a few good batches like the golden samples, and such .

explains why my 'sample' has 1120.

and for folding, i foresee some nice increases, maybe 20% vs the 5 series. still not in nv territory but if you have it there idling doing nothing, 5k or hwatever they put out per day ppd wise is better than nothing.